Creating Pages w/ Children

I am working on a project that allows users to create pages as children of another page.

Currently I have this being noted in the new pages row in a mySQL database. The row has a parent column which has the id of the parent page in it.

However I'm struggling with finding a way to list pages in order by ID, however to have a pages children listed after it.

What the end result will be is a list of pages, and any page that has children has a list inside of it.

So the end HTML would look something like this:

<ul>
<li>Page 1</li>
<li>Page 2
   <ul>
   <li>Child 1</li>
   <li>Child 2</li>
   </ul>
<li>Page 3</li>
</ul>

HTML:

I think I may have to restructure the database, but if I don't have to, that would be awesome.

Thanks for your advice in advance.

 

Okay, so we'll say that your table has an ID column for the page's ID and then an optional parent ID column that references the ID column of that row's parent if it's a child page. We'll assume the columns' names are 'id' and 'parent' and that the default value for 'parent' is 0. We're also gonna assume you have a column named 'title' for the page's title/name.

<?
$query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM pages");
$pages = array();
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($query)) {
  if($row['parent'] != 0) {
    $pages[$row['parent']][1][$row['id']] = $row;
  } else {
    $pages[$row['id']][0] = $row;
  }
}
print "<ul>";
foreach($pages as $id => $page) {
  print "<li>";
  print $page[0]['title'];
  if(is_array($page[1])) {
    print "<ul>";
    foreach($page[1] as $cid => $child) {
      print "<li>" . $child['title'] . "</li>";
    }
    print "</ul>";
  }
  print "</li>"
}
print "</ul>";

/*
 After the while loop, your array would look something like this:
 array(1 => array(0 => array("id" => 1, "parent" => 0, "title" => "Page 1"), 1 => array("2" => array("id" => 2, "parent" => 1, "title" => "Child 1"))),
          3 => array(0 => array("id" => 3, "parent" => 0, "title" => "Page 2")));
 And that's assuming you have 3 pages; first one being Page 1, second one being Child 1 which is the child of Page 1, and third one being Page 2 which is the second parent page with no children.
*/
?>

PHP:

Maybe not the best method but it's what I came up with right away and should work at least.

 

It looks like it'll do the job. I'll play around with this code today to see how well it functions. BTW, you had the database down well, I have all those fields in there named just as you said.

Thanks!